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Is An Amer­i­can Were­wolf in Lon­don a love story?

28 Oct 2019

Words by Anton Bitel

Shirtless male with eyes closed, face covered in blood, biting into something bloody
Shirtless male with eyes closed, face covered in blood, biting into something bloody
Romance, tragedy and hor­ror com­bine to potent effect in direc­tor John Lan­dis’ icon­ic 1981 feature.

Chris Bai­ley (Dave Coop­er) walks in on Lance Boyle (Lucien Mor­gan) and Bren­da Bris­tols (Linzi Drew) while they are hav­ing sex in their bed­room. As naked as they are, Chris asks angri­ly, What are you doing here? You promised nev­er to do this kind of thing again!” When Lance protests, I nev­er promised you any such thing,” Chris replies, Not you, you twit – er!”, at which point Bren­da insists, I’ve nev­er seen you before in my life.”

Real­is­ing with embar­rass­ment that he is in the wrong apart­ment, Chris meek­ly apolo­gies and leaves. Lat­er, while Lance enjoys a post-coital nap, the still naked Bren­da picks up the tele­phone ring­ing beside the bed and says, Hel­lo? No I’m sor­ry. No, nobody of that name. Okay, thank you, bye.”

These scenes are from an adult movie called See You Next Wednes­day – a phrase that recurs as a sort of run­ning in-joke in all of John Lan­dis’ films. Here, See You Next Wednes­day is a film-with­in-a-film, play­ing in the Pic­cadil­ly Cir­cus porn cin­e­ma that David Kessler (David Naughton) vis­its near the end of An Amer­i­can Were­wolf in Lon­don to con­front the grotesque ghosts of all those he has inad­ver­tent­ly killed dur­ing the course of the film.

It is also a mise en abyme of the film that con­tains it. For See You Next Wednes­day adds sur­re­al humour to gen­uine soft­core in much the same way that Lan­dis’ film tem­pers real hor­ror with lots of com­e­dy – and the focus of these absurd snatch­es of dia­logue on mis­tak­en iden­ti­ties and wrong num­bers picks up on a broad­er theme in An Amer­i­can Were­wolf in Lon­don, whether it is the con­fu­sion of human and ani­mal, or the acci­den­tal con­nec­tion made between two relat­ed but nonethe­less dis­tinc­tive nationalities.

This is all in the title: for before Lan­dis’ film has even start­ed we already know not only that lycan­thropy will be play­ing a promi­nent part, but also that this is to be a fish-out-of-water sto­ry, with Amer­i­can and Eng­lish cul­tures form­ing a pic­ture togeth­er that will quite pos­si­bly prove mon­strous. The cul­tur­al hybridi­s­a­tion starts ear­ly, as David and his friend Jack Good­man (Grif­fin Dunne), two young New York Jews on a three-month back-pack­ing tour of Europe, have end­ed up in rur­al York­shire. But when they seek refuge from the cold and rain in the pub The Slaugh­tered Lamb, they might as well, for the way that the locals clear­ly don’t take kind­ly to strangers around these parts, be enter­ing a saloon in a clas­sic Amer­i­can oater.

Indeed, films are very much a part of the con­ver­sa­tion­al land­scape too: when David jok­ing­ly sug­gests that the pen­ta­gram on the pub’s wall is a sign that maybe the own­ers are from Texas’, and Jack tells the bar­maid (Lila Kaye) to remem­ber the Alamo”, she thinks he is try­ing to get her to recall the time that she saw John Wayne’s The Alamo in Leices­ter Square (“Every­body dies in it,” as Jack com­ments on Wayne’s film, in anoth­er mise en abyme, Very bloody”). Even the pen­ta­gram is relat­ed to a film, as Jack tells David, Lon Chaney Jr in Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios main­tained that’s the mark of the Wolfman.”

In all this bar chat, we can see lines and pur­pos­es being crossed – just like in the lat­er dia­logue from See You Next Wednes­day – as Jack and David strug­gle to find warmth, com­fort and wel­come in a place where they are marked as out­siders. The ten­sion inside relax­es only when one of the drinkers (Bri­an Glover) tells a joke about a con­tin­gency from the Unit­ed Nations’ – a French­man, an Amer­i­can and an Eng­lish­man – trav­el­ling togeth­er. The joke is an expres­sion of cul­tur­al com­mon­al­i­ty, even if its punch­line shifts the focus back to Amer­i­can dif­fer­ence, indeed excep­tion­al­ism. And so that joke too might be thought of as reflect­ing the dynam­ics of a film in which an Amer­i­can, alien­at­ed by both his nation­al and reli­gious iden­ti­ty, must trans­form in an imper­fect effort to fit in.

Two people, a man and a woman, wearing red and brown jackets, looking intently at the camera against a dark background.

After Jack has been killed by a beast on the moors, the injured David is trans­ferred to a hos­pi­tal in Lon­don, a more cos­mopoli­tan, less insu­lar envi­ron­ment where the Amer­i­can fits in rather bet­ter, and almost imme­di­ate­ly attracts the atten­tion of Nurse Alex Price (Jen­ny Agut­ter). She reads to him from, sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Mark Twain’s A Con­necti­cut Yan­kee in King Arthur’s Court’ and, unlike the bel­liger­ent York­shire folk, wel­comes this Amer­i­can into her home, where they form a union in the show­er, and in bed, in a sequence that cul­mi­nates with Alex con­spic­u­ous­ly wear­ing David’s NYU t‑shirt. In oth­er words, as these two enjoy their own soft­core scenes togeth­er, they take mutu­al plea­sure in a rela­tion­ship of healthy cross-cul­tur­al exchange.

Yet An Amer­i­can Were­wolf in Lon­don is as much tragedy as love sto­ry – an idea encap­su­lat­ed in Alex’s claim to find David very attrac­tive and a lit­tle bit sad.” David’s own sex­u­al attrac­tion to Alex is repeat­ed­ly inter­cut with his dreams of bes­tial assaults on her, whether per­pe­trat­ed by him­self or by a jump-scar­ing Nazi Oth­er (the ulti­mate Jew­ish fear, espe­cial­ly when in Europe) – and while he might, in going down dur­ing sex, find a salu­tary way to eat’ Alex, his phys­i­cal meta­mor­phoses into a were­wolf make their affair pos­i­tive­ly dan­ger­ous if not impos­si­ble. I love you,” are David’s last words to Alex, You’ve got to stay away from me!” And with that, this brief Anglo-Amer­i­can rap­proche­ment is over, replaced with a cool dis­tance. Alex may love David, but she can­not ulti­mate­ly be with him, except to wit­ness his departure.

Much ink has (right­ly) been spilt about the film’s extra­or­di­nary make-up and trans­for­ma­tion effects (so impres­sive that a new Acad­e­my Award had to be invent­ed for Rick Bak­er), about its killer sound­track, about its per­fect union of hor­ror and com­e­dy, and about its per­fect­ly awk­ward merg­er of sex and night­mare. Yet David’s writhing dis­com­fort in his own skin marks not just the mon­strous meta­mor­pho­sis in and of genre, but also that deep sense of estrange­ment expe­ri­enced by any well-mean­ing if gauche tourist trip­ping up on local lore and mores.

Like a would-be stud in a skin flick enter­ing all the wrong rooms or call­ing all the wrong num­bers, David fails. We see him fail­ing to get arrest­ed by a bob­by in Trafal­gar Square, fail­ing to con­nect – from an icon­ic red Lon­don phone booth – with his par­ents back home one last time, and even fail­ing to kill him­self, or to stop him­self killing oth­ers. Such impo­tence may have no place in a porn film, but it is a famil­iar feel­ing for the for­eign­er – and even if David can find tem­po­rary shel­ter, solace and love in the arms of one Eng­lish woman, he will nonethe­less always be caught between two states and two cultures.

So An Amer­i­can Were­wolf in Lon­don cap­tures the tragi­com­ic sta­tus of a stranger in a strange land – a fig­ure who can often, with­out even real­is­ing it, tram­ple over, if not down­right butch­er, local cus­toms and con­ven­tions, and inspire aggres­sive lynch mob-like respons­es from the parochial pop­u­lace. The irony is that Lan­dis, who is him­self, like David, an Amer­i­can and a Jew abroad, nev­er puts a foot wrong. Per­haps, after all, a cin­e­ma (adult or oth­er­wise) is the ide­al forum where dif­fer­ent cul­tures may meet and sort through their dif­fer­ences with good humour (and a bit of sadness).

An Amer­i­can Were­wolf in Lon­don is released on Blu-ray by Arrow Films in a brand new 4K restora­tion from the orig­i­nal cam­era neg­a­tive super­vised by John Lan­dis on 28 October.

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